:And I never said state ownership was incompatible with dictatorship. I would question, though, whether one could call such states truly socialist. Certainly they couldn't be called 'communist'. Communism requires democracy.

"... the ancient state was essentially a dictatorship of the slaveowners. Did this dictatorship abolish democracy among, and for, the slaveowners? Everybody knows that it did not" (Lenin, "Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky", p.368, from "Marx, Engels, Marxism" Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973).

This was a model of a class dictatorship which was at the same time a class democracy, a democracy for the ruling class only; but this model concerned a case where the ruling class was a minority of the people ruling in the interests of the minority (like the bourgeois democratic state). Lenin's point was that the dictatorship of the proletariat will enable the working class, the majority of the population, to rule in the interests of the majority. There's your democracy.